Windows Task Manager auto-started as an effective CPU monitor in your system tray

Overview:You can use Windows Task Manager as an effective CPU monitor left running in the system tray as a notification icon. It’s light on system resources, and safe to leave running full-time. Discreetly shows you how busy your system is, at-a-glance. Moving your mouse cursor over the icon provides a surprisingly handy pop-up view of CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network utilization, seen at right.

This article will walk you through the exact process of getting Task Manager to start with Windows, automatically. So even if you reboot, you can count on this little system tray icon being there for you. The amount of color in the grey rectangle indicates CPU load, at-a-glance. Always visible when working at your desktop. Easy to locate when you double-click it, say, when you wish to bring up the Task Manager application for quickly killing a misbehaving app, for example. Also avoids the need to remember the Ctrl+Shift+Esc keyboard shortcut. Do remember to minimize (not close) Task Manager after using it, so it’ll tuck itself right back down into your system tray, ready for the next time, without cluttering your taskbar.

This guide was developed with Windows 8’s greatly improved built-in Task Manager in mind, but you can get much of the same CPU monitoring functionality all the way back to Windows XP. I’ve been using this handy auto-start technique for a decade, on hundreds of physical and virtual Windows systems. Figured it’s about time I document it, step-by-step. So what better place to do so than right here on Dan Stolt’s IT Pro Guru Blog? Text, video, and screenshot versions of the same procedure all appear below. Simply pick your favorite, give it a shot, then let us know how it goes by commenting at the end. Enjoy!

close your plain text editor, which by default for most systems is Notepad

when prompted about wanting to save changes, click the ‘Save’ button

Create a shortcut and edit its properties to start minimized, making it more discreet at startup

right-click and hold ‘StartTaskManager.cmd’ to drag it to your Desktop

let go of mouse button

a menu pops up, choose ‘Create shortcuts here’

right-click on the new shortcut, select ‘Properties’

in the Run option drop down menu, choose ‘Minimized’, then click the ‘OK’ button

Move this customized shortcut to your Startup folder

copy the following 1 line of text into your clipboard by highlighting, then Ctrl+CShell:Common Startup

press ‘Win+R’ to bring up the Run dialogue

press ‘Ctrl+V’ then press your ‘Enter’ key, which opens your ‘Startup’ folder, the special folder where everything in it is automatically launched shortly after you reboot, login, and begin to see your desktop

left-click then drag the ‘Task Manager’ icon over to the right, next to your clock, so your eyeballs will always know exactly where to look

next time you reboot, you’ll see ‘Task Manager’ automatically launches

when rebooting and first logging in to get to your desktop, ‘Task Manager’ shows up in both the taskbar and system tray, just click the larger taskbar icon twice, and it’ll then disappear from the taskbar, remaining only in the system tray, as it intended

Task Manager special collapsed overview mode, obtained by click on ‘Performance” tab, then double-clicking on ‘CPU’ icon in left column

Task Manager special collapsed view of Ethernet, obtained by click ‘Performance” tab, then single-clicking on Ethernet at left, then double-clicking on graph at right

Known issues:

After a reboot, Task Manager appears in both the taskbar and system tray, despite the chosen ‘Hide when minimized’ option. The workaround is simple, just left-click on the taskbar icon twice, and poof, it’ll disappear from the taskbar. But it’d be nicer to automate this. My attempts at adding ‘start /min’ and ‘start /max’ to the script seem to fail to get around this.*

The ‘Options’ you configured in ‘Task Manager’ aren’t always saved, sometimes forgetting your preferences after a reboot, for example.

Administrative rights are required.

For unknown reasons, after weeks of working fine, Task Manager’s ‘View’, ‘Update Speed’ spontaneously gets into ‘Paused’ state, stuck at a false maximum CPU busy indication. Workaround is to change back to ‘Normal’, then live monitoring immediately resumes.

Future improvement ideas:

Find a workaround for “Known issue” #1, outlined above.

Due to habit, it’s common to accidentally close Task Manager when using it rather than merely minimizing it. This means you lose the system tray icon until the next time you launch Task Manager. Perhaps Powershell and Task Scheduler are methods I’ll explore, read more here.

Some advanced users looking to squeeze every last bit of performance from their system may wish to tweak Task Manager’s ‘View’ menu, choosing ‘Update speed’, ‘Low’ to reduce impact on system performance. Unfortunately, this setting can also be lost, due to known issue #2 above.

For the recommended ‘Notifications area’ tweak I demonstrate, I’ve discovered that you can also just drag and drop Task Manager straight from the list of icons seen here, to the bottom-right of the system tray.

Make setting this up faster and easier.

Change log:

Feb 24 2013*: Added prerequisite first step to the written and screenshot instructions, making sure ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ is unchecked. If this step is skipped, the batch file will be created with the wrong file type/won’t run. In the video, file extensions were already set to visible, prior to the production of the recording. Also added 2 more collapsed views that enthusiasts might appreciate.

If your auto-start is unreliable, see also Dan’s fix, in the comments below. Here’s a copy:

Dan Stolts ITProGuru on March 20, 2014 at 10:34 am said:
Great article Paul, thanks so much…
I moved the shortcut into the startup folder, modified the shortcut properties (in the startup folder) to put the “c:command” folder in the “Start In” field and changed the Target to “C:CommandStartTaskManager.cmd” then changed the Run: to “Minimized” the task manager appears to reliably start minimized.
Thanks a bunch